How’s The Histogram Hanging?
The Perfect Solution For Asymmetrical Countries
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Living in a country that is not symmetrical can lead to a lot of annoyances: They range from the uneven distribution of resources, difficulties in transportation, infrastructure development and limited access to certain areas, to administrative complexity and cultural-linguistic fragmentation.
First and foremost however, it creates too much empty space in a cool data viz! And since I am not Edward Tufte (save the ink!), something needs to be done about this. Surely we could just add a nice gradient or discrete color legend in the left corner? Well, actually we are going to implement something here that serves as a legend, histogram and exploration tool at the same time.
Perfect Companions
The job of an ordinary color legend is helping you read the respective values on the map by eyesight, giving you an orientation where a regionally displayed data point is located in an ordered distribution. But why not go one step further? Instead of just showing the values of the color breaks, we can stack (or in this case reversely stack) each data point again in the legend. By additionally allowing to mark each point in both charts you get a much more precise understanding about where the municipalities are located.
A bit hidden in the visualization is its interval selection feature. By clicking and dragging above the x-axis you can select a range to be displayed on the map. This makes it easier to immediately identify similar areas on the map, focusing on exploring a subset of the data only. Together this constitutes a much more sound exploration tool for regional variation.
Perhaps you suffer the same fate as I do? If you live in an irregular shaped country, send me some geospatial data from said country and I will do my best to come up with an accompanying viz. After all one could think of much more than just boiling a legend down to a histogram.
